Fine Art + Personal Work
The work I make when nobody has commissioned anything.
These are the ongoing series — figure studies, self portraits, and collaborations with models, stylists, and hair and makeup artists. It is where I test what the process can be pushed to do, and it is where most of what I have learned about light came from.
Black and white, chiaroscuro, and a medium that renders skin unlike anything else make the human form an obvious subject. The studio is small and the light is scarce, which forces compositions I would not otherwise arrive at.
The figure work running through all of it is an ongoing exploration of form, contour and the limits of a small studio — collaborative by necessity, because holding a deliberate pose through a wet plate exposure is real work.
Some of this work was made in sets — two plates, or three, from a single sitting and meant to be read together. A tintype has no negative, so a set is not a burst of frames from which one is chosen: every plate is its own object, made deliberately, one after another. What changes between them is the whole point. Often it is a study in duality — the same person read two ways, or two sides of one idea.
Bodies
Figure work where the body is the subject rather than the setting. Collaborative, slow, and made with a great deal of conversation before anyone picks up a camera. Grouped separately here so it can be viewed on purpose rather than by accident.
Shibari
My most ambitious project involves models, hair and makeup artists, stylists and rope artists working toward a limited series of plates on the fragility of gender roles and the resilience of individuals.
Self Portraits
The hardest possible version of this process. Pre-focus the scene, hit the mark exactly, trigger the shutter, and hope. Spanning 2017 to now.
Natural Light
Ask someone to hold still for ten seconds and watch what happens. Wet plate collodion is roughly a thousand times less sensitive than a modern sensor; in the studio I solve that with strobes, but outdoors on daylight alone there is no solving it — only the sun, whatever it is doing that hour, and an exposure measured in seconds. That constraint is the whole appeal. A ten-second portrait is not a moment caught, it is ten seconds of a person averaged together, and faces go still in a way they never do for a fast shutter. Every location plate means carrying a portable dark box and enough water to wash a plate, working inside the ten or fifteen minutes before the collodion dries. I have made plates in a dust storm in Monument Valley and in wildfire smoke in Yosemite; neither was planned. Bad light is not always bad — smoke is an enormous diffuser, and an overcast sky is the largest softbox available.